Sunday, October 12, 2008

The Return

Back to the beach. The subconscious is such a powerful force. However much the conscious self asserts itself, dancing around places, memories, thoughts, avoiding them, we are at the mercy of our dreaming selves. Like Freud's 'inbox' - that the dream works to empty the accumulation of things not dealt with - the dream created a surreal landscape that coalesced the fragments of place and space. Here but not [t]here. On the beach a swarm of mayflies form a perfect sphere. They do this around the beach and along the lake edges - not in spheres, in general - but in huge pulsing dark forms that appear and disappear as they dart from side-on to front-on. But here they were, forming a perfect globe, hovering above the stony shore. Each time I raised my camera, they flew to the four winds. Then, up in the sky, more mirabilia ... a flock of birds swoop low, revealing their strong, muscular forms. Yet each bird in the flock was of a different species ... all large and chunky ... an albatross, a black-backed gull, a paradise duck, a kereru, one of the lake's black swans ...

The haunting continues, as the birds fly with certain menace, meanness, meaning business...